Winning Is Not Enough - Book Review

To be honest, I've never been a great fan of Jackie Stewart. Though I'm too young to have seen him race, I'm well aware that he was one of the sport's all time greats. You don't win three World Championships without being very special indeed, and you certainly don't win by four whole minutes - in the rain - at the Nordschliefe, without otherworldly talent. No matter how good Dunlop's wet weather rubber might have been....

But out of the car, or more to the point, in his post-F1 career as a team owner, sponsor's 'representative' and pundit, I never warmed to him. To me, he came across as hectoring, self impo0rtant and someone who had played a part in the sport's becoming more corporate, more sanitised. I've never met the man, though, and to judge him solely by his public persona is being more than a little unfair. Nonetheless, it was with some ambivalence that I picked up his mammoth 500+ page autobiography, Winning is not enough.


Stewart's Tyrrell 001 - the car in which he won his first World title.

The book left me with a somewhat revised, and perhaps more positive opinion of Stewart the man. Reading his account of growing up, the son of a garage owner in a small conservative Scottish town in the early 1950s, it becomes clear that he's very much a product of his time and his place. A fastidious, serious-minded and honest man, from a culture which believed in the virtues of hard work, of being careful with money, of not taking unnecessary chances. His account of his early struggles with dyslexia, and of his later work to encourage the UK and Scottish Governments to do more to assist children with the condition left me with a newfound respect for the man - it is hard to imagine many of today's pampered sportsmen - racing drivers or otherwise - being prepared to put in the time and effort required to influence Government policy.

The problem I had was not so much with Stewart the man, but with the book. Fundamentally, people will pick it up because Jackie Stewart is a triple Formula 1 World Champion, a winner of 27 Grands Prix, who later went on to establish his own team with his son, which itself went on to win the German Grand Prix of 1999 before he sold up to Ford. Yet his racing career takes up, I think, less than a third of the book.

Now I suspect that Stewart himself does not regard his F1 titles as necessarily the greatest achievements of his life, and he perhaps does not want to be defined by them. I doubt I'm alone though, among likely readers, in not being especially interested in Stewart's post-F1 business career. And an awful lot of the book is given over to his later work for Ford, Rolex and sundry corporations. For the most part, it's not terribly interesting stuff. His account of his work for Ford advising them on new models is mildly diverting and shows how the skills he learned on the race track could be put to use elsewhere, but I fail to see why anybody should be particularly interested in his role as an 'ambassador' for the Royal Bank of Scotland and his friendship with its disgraced former Chief Executive, Fred Goodwin. More than anything else, this was a book crying out for a good editor to impose some discipline, get rid of some of the more tiresome name-dropping and the life-advice that reminded me of nothing so much as a mother reminding her son to wash behind his ears...

There's some good stuff lurking in this book though. A paean to the Tyrrell 003, the car with which Stewart won 8 Grands Prix and the 1971 World title, and arguably the most successful individual chassis ever produced in F1. A moving tribute to his 1973 team mate Francois Cevert, who was killed in practice for the final race of that season at Watkins Glen is just one illustration of quite how much more dangerous motorsport was in Stewart's day. He was one of many of Stewart's contemporaries - Clark, Mclaren, Rindt, Siffert and many more besides, who died at the wheel. For all that Denis Jenkinson never entirely forgave him for it, Stewart deserves much credit for his single-minded drive to improve safety standards in the sport and probably there are not a few drivers who would not be alive today but for his work.


If Stewart can dedicate a whole chapter of his biography to his dogs, then you can surely forgive me one picture of my old Setter...

Unfortunately, there's not nearly as much detail about his racing career as I would have liked to have seen. The 1968 and 1972 seasons get only a few dismissive lines - which in a book of more than 500 pages, seems hard to justify. Especially when he's quite happy to dedicate more than 20 pages to a meeting with King Hussein of Jordan, and a whole chapter to his pet dogs. There are aspects of his post-F1 career I would have liked to know more about though. The establishment of Stewart F1, the last real independent Grand Prix team to emerge before the manufacturer teams took over at the turn of the century, was an incredible achievement. That, together with his son, Paul, he created a team which won a race in only its third season and did so without ever going into debt is, in the context of the litany of expensive disasters that is the history of new F1 teams over the last 30 years, scarcely credible. And yet there's only a fairly brief potted account of how he actually did it.


A 1998 Stewart F1 car - now resident in the National Museum of Scotland

His reluctance to provide more than a summary of his time as BRDC president is more understandable. As he himself remarks, that chapter of his life really needs a book in itself, and given some of those involved, a veritable phalanx of lawyers to go over it prior to publication. He makes a spirited case for the Government lending financial support to the British Grand Prix, though in the end, I remain unconvinced, and left wondering if he fully appreciates how politically difficult it would be to pour taxpayers' money into CVC's coffers, no matter how many jobs the race might ultimately sustain.

Perhaps it is Jackie Stewart's very success, the sense of a life well lived, which is the downfall of this book. I was struck by how much more interesting the last racing biography I read, Tommy Byrne's Crashed and Byrned, was - but perhaps that is only because the reasons for Byrne's ultimate failure at the highest level of the sport make a more intriguing tale than Stewart's success.

In the end, while I didn't dislike the book as such, I can't really recommend it wholeheartedly either. If you're a huge Jackie Stewart fan, there's probably enough to hold your interest, but if you're looking for a racing biography, there are better books out there. Aside from the aforementioned Crashed and Byrned, Niki Lauda's biography, To Hell and Back, is similarly comprehensive, in covering his life outside racing, but, perhaps because Lauda was always a more outspoken, less polite man, its a more interesting read. And that's the problem with this book. Stewart, a man who settled easily into corporate life after his retirement, is not a man to dish the dirt, to tell untold stories. And in a man, that is perhaps admirable, but in an autobiographer, it left me feeling a little short-changed.

Waving the Saltire

Trivia Question: Name the small Northern European country whose drivers have racked up five Formula 1 World Titles over the years. If you think the answer is Finland, then you're wrong. Between them, Keke Rosberg, Hakkinen and Raikkonen have racked up four titles, though there remains the possibility that Raikkonen or perhaps even Kovalainen, could add to that total (Rosberg fils races under a German licence and doesn't count).

The correct answer is my adopted home, Scotland, as a recent visit to the National Museum of Scotland, where Jackie Young Stewart's 1973 Tyrrell currently takes pride of place by the entrance, reminded me. Now you can get into an argument as to whether Scotland is really a 'country' in its own right at all (though it's not necessarily a debate I'd recommend starting on the streets of Glasgow or Edinburgh, especially in the evening after the rugby or the football), but there is no doubt that for a decade, between 1963 and 1973, Jim Clark and Jackie Stewart ensured that Scotland was preeminent in the world of Formula 1.



For all that the two men came from the same small part of the world - southern Scotland, they appeared to be very different people. Where Jim is remembered as a quiet, shy man of few words, who let his driving do the talking - a BBC documentary on his career, which aired earlier this year, was titled The Quiet Champion', Jackie was and remains a flamboyant, outspoken personality, never afraid to say what is on his mind. He campaigned hard on driver safety, and an astute businessman, he was perhaps the first to see race driving as a 'career' in the modern sense of the word. What the two men did have in common was that they were the outstanding talents of their age.



Despite its achievements in the F1 world, motorsport has a low profile north of the border. The two big Scottish newspapers, The Scotsman and The Herald, generally provide only the most cursory coverage of the sport (in marked contrast with some London-based broadsheets, perhaps most surprisingly the left-leaning and hardly car-loving Guardian which has, perhaps, the best coverage of the lot). Nor does it much impinge on the popular consciousness. Certainly, in my office, I'm in a minority of one in being more interested in Button vs. Barrichello vs. Vettel than in the Auld Firm rivalry and the latest tribulations of Hearts under its Lithuanian owner. I don't think anyone else regularly tunes in to BBC1 for the F1. And as for any other forms of motorsport....

Part of the explanation, I suspect, lies in the absence of any really successful Scottish racing drivers for the best part of 20 years after Jackie Stewart retired. Yes, Johnny Dumfries won the British F3 championship, but his career never recovered after he found himself partnered with Ayrton Senna at Lotus in 1986, though he did go on to win Le Mans with Jaguar. At a national level, the likes of John Cleland and David Leslie met with considerable success, but for 20 years, no Scottish driver really established himself on the international stage (though I always thought that the late David Leslie had the talent to do so, if not the breaks).

I suspect it doesn't help, either, that there is now only one permanent race track in Scotland - the small though deceptively tricky Knockhill circuit, across the bridge from Edinburgh. At just 1.3m in length, and lacking much in the way of passing places for anything not capable of running door-handle to door-handle it means that, an annual visit by the BTCC circus aside, it rarely plays host to race meets of real significance (though the Scottish Motor Racing Club do put on a good show). Contrast that with the south and midlands of England, with Silverstone, Donington Park, Brands Hatch, Oulton Park and a host of smaller venues and its easy to see why the sport has never caught the public imagination to the same degree up here. At one time, there was the Ingliston circuit on the outskirts of Edinburgh, but that had disappeared by the time I moved here in the mid-1990s and the place is now used only for the Royal Highland Show - rather oddly as it is a good 3 hours train ride from the Highlands...

It can't be down to a lack of successful Scottish racers any longer though. In the early 1990s a trio of youngsters driving for the father-and-son David Leslie Racing operation would go on to make a very significant impact on the sport. First came Allan McNish. Shooting to prominence in the 1990 F3000 championship, his career thereafter spent some time in the doldrums, before he hooked up with Porsche to win Le Mans, and then moved to Toyota to work first with their sportscar programme and eventually with their fledgling F1 effort. This led to a season in F1 in 2002, but things never really worked out there, and he has subsequently established himself as a sportscar racer par excellence, one of the lynchpins of Audi's sportscar programme, winning the ALMS three times and claiming another Le Mans victory in 2008.

Next up came another Dumfries and Galloway man, David Coulthard. In his early years, he didn't strike me as quite as quick as McNish, but he was the one who progressed easily to F1, first with Williams and then with Mclaren. If he never quite had the last couple of tenths that might have enabled him to add to the five titles picked up by Clark and Stewart, but though he may never have entirely convinced people like myself he was truly from the top drawer, he did win 13 Grands Prix which is more than all but a small handful of racing drivers can claim.

A year or two behind him was Scots-Italian Dario Franchitti. Unable to make the break into Formula 1, he instead went off to ply his trade in the US, first in the then-strong Champ Car Series, and later in the Indy Racing League. In 2007, ten years after his debut, he won the IRL series and the Indianapolis 500. There followed an unsuccessful diversion into NASCAR, but this year he came back to the IRL with Chip Ganassi Racing and secured his second title by winning the final race at Homestead last weekend.

And what was the extent to which all this was followed in Scotland? A brief mention on the evening news and that was it. Chances are, nothing short of a Scottish rival to Lewis Hamilton will change that. Though you never know, maybe a street-race round Glasgow would be just the ticket....